Hedges and boosters in medical and engineering research articles: A comparative corpus-based study

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Published: Nov 4, 2019
Updated: 2019-11-04
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2019-11-04 (1)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.18844/gjflt.v9i4.4342

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Mehrdad Sepehri
Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, Shahrekord Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shahrekord, Iran
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8357-1444
Mehrnnoosh Hajijalili
Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, Shahrekord Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shahrekord, Iran
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4652-9423
Ehsan Namaziandost
Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, Shahrekord Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shahrekord, Iran
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8393-2537

Abstract

This study aimed to compare the use of hedges and boosters in medical sciences and engineering research articles. To fulfil this objective, the researcher provided 30 medical and 30 engineering research articles to identify the hedging and boosting devices used in them. The research articles were analysed according to lexical devices classification, focusing on hedges and boosters. The AntConc concordance software was used to identify the instances of hedges and boosters in both disciplines. Frequency, percentage and the Chi-square test were run to analyse the data. The results indicated that the difference between the frequency of hedges and boosters in medical sciences and engineering research articles was significant and meaningful. Moreover, the outcomes indicated that the most frequent hedges were epistemic modality verbs, quantifiers and nouns and the most frequent boosters were nouns, lexical verbs, modal verbs and adjectives. These discoveries of this paper may have some implications for the teaching of academic writing, especially to EFL learners.


Keywords: Boosters, engineering research articles, hedges, medical research articles

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How to Cite
Sepehri, M., Hajijalili, M., & Namaziandost, E. (2019). Hedges and boosters in medical and engineering research articles: A comparative corpus-based study. Global Journal of Foreign Language Teaching, 9(4), 215–225. https://doi.org/10.18844/gjflt.v9i4.4342
Issue
Vol. 9 No. 4 (2019): November
Section
Articles
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